In the fields of food-processing and aquatic products and fishery industry, it is a continuous research issue to develop and improve a rapid and automatic way for shedding superficial adherent substances off creatures (e.g. fishes).
Taking conventional automatic apparatus and process for shedding fish scales as an example. After a fish is manually clamped, the fish scales are automatically or semi-automatically shed off the fish by a scraper set of the automatic apparatus. The same procedure is repeated until the fish scales of all fishes are shed off. In addition, another conventional automatic apparatus employs a flushing unit comprising a water source, a pressurizing motor and many high-pressure water pipes instead of the scraper set. The high-pressure spout of water generated by the pressurizing motor is employed to shed the fish scales off the clamped fishes one by one.
Moreover, the above mentioned apparatus may further comprise a channel with a conveyor belt for transporting the fishes into the channel one by one. Afterwards, the fish scales are automatically shed off the fishes so as to reduce the time period of processing the fishes.
The above techniques, however, still have some drawbacks. For example, since the procedure of shedding the fish scales should be performed on a single fishes in a clamped status or in the channel for each time, the processing speed is restricted. In addition, the conventional automatic apparatus and process fail to simultaneously shed the fish scales off multiple fishes and thus the throughput is usually insufficient.